The phrase ‘necessary but evil‘ does not describe it for me. For starters, I wholeheartedly believe Klout is not evil, nor do I believe it is necessary. I do, though, think it is an important, early tool for understanding ourselves. Further, I believe it is not only useful for companies seeking the citizen influencer/evangelist, but also for those citizens, themselves. It is in the public domain, so I am not giving any secrets away, but the complexity of the Klout algorithm is impressive; As many know, it was just updated earlier this month and has 400 or so inputs, or signals. So long as people do not freak out over their own scores, I think they can learn a lot about their personas.. I am anxious to see what we (the industry) will be able to do in terms of aligning online and offline behaviors of unified users, and then predicting what they will do next.

Several of us have been saying this for years. I think it takes someone with enough mainstream social cred to say it for a shift to occur. Here’s Brian’s quote:

Executives don’t think about tools they think about results. Aligning social and digital strategies with business objectives and priorities is the foundation for earning buy-in from the c-suite. Talking about Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and attempting to create “new” metrics to substantiate investments is ultimately a losing battle. And quite honestly, you’re risking competitive positioning and customer relationships by not thinking about engagement in channels where people are of their own free will and mind to come and go as they please.

Rep­u­ta­tion mat­ters. Many mar­keters and brand man­agers are prob­a­bly won­der­ing how best to lever­age social media to gauge rep­u­ta­tion. Until now, sen­ti­ment scores and cherry picked men­tions (or as we call them, ‘ver­ba­tims’) from sen­ti­ment reports have served this func­tion for most. This method, though, has two prob­lems: 1) the lack of accu­racy in sen­ti­ment engines, and 2) the need for some math involved—a numer­a­tor and denom­i­na­tor or a ‘this’ vs. ‘that’ ratio would pro­vide such a mea­sur­able, track­able score. (read the rest on Adobe’s blog)

Some of you know how the dilution of the concept of curate/curation/curator irritates me. I enjoyed John Battelle’s thoughts and will share an excerpt from On Thneeds and the “Death of Display”http://t.co/D7Y8v9vB below:

Perhaps I’m becoming a cranky old man, a Lorax, if you must, but I’m going to jump up on a stump right now and say it: curation-based platform models that harvest the work of great content creators, creating “Thneeds” along the way, are failing to see the forest for the trees. Their quid pro quo deal to “send more traffic” ain’t enough.

It’s time that content creators derived real value from the platforms they feed. A new model is needed, and if one doesn’t emerge (or is obstructed by the terms of service of large platforms), I worry about the future of the open web itself. If we, as an industry, don’t get just a wee bit better at taking care of content creators, we’re going to destroy our own ecosystem – and we’ll watch the Pinterests, Twitters, and yes, even the Google and Facebooks of the world deteriorate for lack of new content to curate.

Over a year ago I showed his video from Harvard to the Atlanta consulting group where I started a social media practice. Earlier today I decided to post a gripe I had and he quickly engaged with me on the issue. Below are some of his creations:

I was chatting with a friend on Facebook the other day and she encouraged me to post my gripe with Dan Zarrella. I’m a fan of what he has done, but here it is, verbatim:
“I used to like Zarrella’s stuff but I feel as though he has not advanced at all beyond this ‘how to get more tweets’ technique- he was saying the same thing two years ago. Would like to see him come out with something new. He reminds me of a momentum trader (as opposed to a long term investor).”

Cumulus: A pile, a mound, a heap. A collection of objects laid on top of each other. The word Social has become diluted, but you get the idea–we’re here to socially accumulate our ideas and solutions to help ourselves and the world around us. For now, two main sections: SERVICE DESIGN TOOLS and SOCIAL MEDIA & ANALYTICS. Please borrow and contribute. -jw